Friday, April 04, 2008

Mukasey's shameful lie about 9/11 prevention

A shocking story--not just because Mukasey lied, not just because he shed crocodile tears while lying, not just because he's using a lie to drum up support for illegal wiretapping when wiretapping in the case he describes was already legal, not just because it reveals that the Bush administration pointedly and deliberately ignored 9/11 warning signs--but above all because the story's not a screaming headline in the mainstream news. So here it is for my known readership of three.

Last week, during a question-and-answer session following a speech he delivered San Francisco, Attorney General Michael Mukasey revealed a startling and extremely newsworthy fact. As I wrote last Saturday, Mukasey claimed that, prior to 9/11, the Bush administration was aware of a telephone call being made by an Al Qaeda Terrorist from what he called a “safe house in Afghanistan” into the U.S., but failed to eavesdrop on that call. Some help is needed from readers here to generate the attention for this story that it requires.

In that speech, Mukasey blamed FISA’s warrant requirement for the failure to eavesdrop on that call — an assertion which is, for multiple reasons that I detailed in that post, completely false. He then tearfully claimed that FISA therefore caused the deaths of “three thousand people who went to work that day.” For obvious reasons, the Attorney Geenral’s FISA falsehoods themselves are extremely newsworthy, but it is the story he told about the pre-9/11-planning call from Afghanistan itself that is truly new, and truly extraordinary.

Critically, the 9/11 Commission Report — intended to be a comprehensive account of all relevant pre-9/11 activities — makes no mention whatsoever of the episode Mukasey described. What has been long publicly reported in great detail are multiple calls that were made between a global communications hub in Yemen and the U.S. — calls which the NSA did intercept without warrants (because, contrary to Mukasey’s lie, FISA does not and never did require a warrant for eavesdropping on foreign targets) but which, for some unknown reason, the NSA failed to share with the FBI and other agencies. But the critical pre-9/11 episode Mukasey described last week is nowhere to be found in the 9/11 Report or anywhere else. It just does not exist.

Yesterday, I contacted Lee Hamilton, the 9/11 Commission Vice Chairman, to ask him whether the Commission was ever told about Mukasey’s alleged Afghan Terrorist 9/11-planning telephone calls and/or the Bush administration’s failure/inability to eavesdrop on such calls. Hamilton refused to comment, first claiming that he was in meetings all day yesterday and had no time to talk to me. When asked if he would comment today or whenever he had time, he said he was not going to comment on this ever, since he had not read Mukasey’s speech. Calls to 9/11 Executive Director Philip Zelikow seeking comment were not returned and 9/11 Commission Chairman Tom Kean could not yet be reached.

It’s unacceptable for Hamilton to refuse to comment on Mukasey’s claims. The whole purpose of the 9/11 Commission was to ensure that there was full-scale investigation and disclosure of all facts relevant to the 9/11 attacks, including the Government’s actions and inactions in preventing that attack from occurring.

If the Attorney General of the United States, out of the blue, makes an extraordinary and new assertion in a public speech about an easy opportunity the Bush administration had to detect those attacks — an opportunity he claims was lost because of eavesdropping laws — Hamilton ought to say whether the Commission was ever told about this incident and/or whether Mukasey is telling the truth. Preventing high government officials from lying about the 9/11 attacks or exposing concealment of key 9/11 facts is his obligation as Vice Chairman of the Commission. Some type of comment from 9/11 Commission officials on Mukasey’s claims is vital for generating further attention to this story and for compelling Mukasey to account for what he said.

Hamilton is currently the President and Director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and director of The Center on Congress at Indiana University. Please email him at the address below, politely set forth the extraordinary claims the Attorney General just made about the 9/11 attacks (with citations to media sources about the speech — including here, here, and here), and urge him to fulfill his obligation as 9/11 Commission Vice Chair by confirming whether Mukasey’s revelations are true and/or were disclosed to the Commission during its investigation: Lee.hamilton@wilsoncenter.org.

This isn’t just a matter of academic and historical interest about the 9/11 attacks, although it is that. One of two things almost certainly happened here, each of which is of great importance. Either Mukasey is lying about the 9/11 attacks in order to manipulate Americans into believing that FISA’s warrant requirements are what prevented discovery of the 9/11 attacks and caused 3,000 American deaths — a completely disgusting act by the Attorney General which obviously cannot be ignored. Or, Mukasey has just revealed the most damning fact yet about the Bush’s administration’s ability and failure to have prevented the attacks — facts that, until now, were apparently concealed from the 9/11 Commission and the public.

Since I wrote about this on Saturday, there has been some slowly evolving media attention paid to it. On Monday, I discussed the story on the radio with Rachel Maddow who, as always, grasped completely its importance. The following night, she was on Countdown with Keith Olbermman, which had a lengthy and detailed segment, highlighting all of the right questions (video below). Raw Story compiled a very thorough article with the key facts, and the top Daily Kos post this morning does the same.

The great significance of this story — that Mukasey either completely fabricated a key 9/11 event or just revealed a heretofore unknown 9/11 bombshell — is self-evident and made clear by these growing accounts. Having Hamilton, Kean and/or Zelikow comment on the veracity of Mukasey’s claims about the 9/11 attacks — as they ought to do — is vital for advancing the story.

Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book “How Would a Patriot Act?,” a critique of the Bush administration’s use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, “A Tragic Legacy“, examines the Bush legacy.

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About Me

I'm interested in what grows between the paving stones of received wisdom. I like to see what happens when people of differing opinion engage in respectful dialogue. There's not enough of that. I like to look at ordinary events and ask questions about why they are so. I try to spend some time really listening to trees and other silent things. I think about happiness, and the things people do to try to achieve it. What is happiness, and how do you know if you're happy? What are people really seeking when they seek happiness? For me, real happiness most often seems to come from doing something, however laughable, to make the world a better place. And, of course, reading the Funny Times